Windows Phone Summary of the Week: May 7 - May 13, 2012

It's another Sunday, which means it's another summary of the week time here at WPCentral. In this recap of the past 6 days, we harvest all the stories you may have missed that are worth reading up on. So make a cup of tea, sit back and enjoy the ride. As always, before we crack on with the summary itself we'll run through some WPCentral-related headlines. First up is a guide by our Daniel Rubino, which walks us through how we can get a new Live ID and keep all Windows Phone app / game purchases. Neat!

WPCentral member SpeedTouch hosted a Windows Phone meetup in St Louis and was a relatively good success. Faisal Iqbal got fed up of a problem many smartphone users find themselves hitting where sharing websites can prove to be quite an issue. He developed a small Javascript bookmark that can be loaded on you Windows Phone when browsing a website. This will then load a QR code that another smartphone can scan to open up that exact webpage. Ingenious.

Have you just purchased a shiny new smartphone running Microsoft's OS? Are you wandering how the company's cloud storage service SkyDrive integrates into the platform? We've got you covered with our introduction to SkyDrive guide. Episode 142 of the WPCentral Podcast is now live on website where we discuss Samsung, Nokia and more. On our community forum, we've introduced a new user group for residential developers to make use of their experience on our boards. Alas, that's enough of us, let's get into this summary.

Samsung kicks us off with their plans to take on Nokia in the Windows Phone market with "Apollo" handsets built with Android hardware, will they succeed? Microsoft has added 300 new titles to the Brazilian Marketplace, which features tighter restrictions and requirements for games. Senior User Experience Designer for Windows Phone, Artuo Toledo, leaves Microsoft. The genius has plans to publish a free ebook for developers using his Metro development series.

Nokia has been a busy bee with Windows Phone. From going overboard with advertising to holding massive events, the manufacturer shows no signs of letting up. This is reaffirmed with news of the company striking new partnerships with developers and companies to bring more official apps to the Marketplace. There have been growing concerns from the community that these partnerships could cause fragmentation in the ecosystem, much like what Android suffers from, but we take a look at how this is not the case.

According to sources familiar with company plans, Microsoft has shown interest in having a Facebook certified phone run on their platform. Question is: why can't Facebook certify Windows Phone as the dominant OS? It's arguably the most socially connected, especially with Facebook itself. Nokia has begun rebranding the Marketplace app on Lumia Windows Phones with a new tile that has a cartoon-like bag with an "n" labeled on top. To close up our highlights, Microsoft is set to unleash an overhaul of Bing to make the search engine more social and give the experience a simplistic feel.

As well as signing deals and forming partnerships to bring apps to the platform, Nokia also got Six Flags on-board to create an app for all their theme parks. Official TIME Magazine and LinkedIn apps have now appeared on the Marketplace. With the built-in integration for LinkedIn, it's good to see an official app to compliment Windows Phone. Speaking of publications, The Daily Beast also releases an official app for Windows Phone, should you be interested in such opinionated news.

The popular Manga Reader for Windows Phone has been updated and is now available for free without any advertisements. Nextgen Reader also received an update packing more functionality and features with a helpful tutorial when first launching the app. YouTube Pro is dead. Long live SuperTube! The video streaming app is also completely free too. my NHS has been released onto the Marketplace, which also supports Microsoft's Health Vault service.

We covered the amusing news this week which saw Siri, Apple's personal assistant for the iPhone 4S, recommend the Lumia 900 when asked "What is the best cell phone ever?" At least it's accurate? Ben Rudolph, who started the Smoked by Windows Phone marketing campaign earlier in the year has released some insightful statistics surrounding the campaign - Windows Phone has a 95% global win rate. Not too shabby!

An upcoming Windows Phone developer conference reveals some details surrounding the upcoming "Apollo" update and states that it's due to be out this year. The Nokia and Microsoft "Ready.Set () {Code}" challenges kicked off this weekend, be sure to check the event dates out for available places. We close up the developer news and this week's summary with the news of Verious opening up the pool of resources for Windows Phone developers to tap into.